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Saturday, August 3, 2013

There's No Excuse

Our laundry room is in the basement. Fortunately, it’s not
one of those creepy basements like you see in the movies, but I still avoid it
like the plague. Primarily because
the laundry room is down there, and to me, that is scarier than even the
scariest basement ghosts and goblins.

Unlike my big sister, who infamously did a load of laundry
while in labor with my nephew, I am not a fan of this the most mundane of
mundane chores. I do it only when completely necessary, and usually when only
granny panties are left in the underwear lineup. The excuses I can fabricate to
evade laundry are both numerous and varied and, at points during my history as
a laundry-doer, have included:

Well, I need to give some of my other clothes a
chance to be worn anyway.

I heard something in the basement and will wait
until Jeremy gets home to investigate (at which point, I totally forget about
doing the laundry and successfully put it off to another day completely).

The laundry basket is too heavy and may cause me
to fall down the stairs.

Meh, it can wait until tomorrow. “After all,
tomorrow is another day.”

Making excuses is easy. It’s one of the easiest things I do.
If it’s something I don’t want to do, I can give you a list of at least a dozen
reasons to delay it or to not do it all. You could call it a skill of mine. For
the longest time, Jeremy and I made excuses for not exercising. The most common
excuse? “We don’t have time.”

Strangely enough, we did have the time to sit around and
watch TV, to play around on the internet, to immerse ourselves in video games
or books. We could do any of those activities for hours in the evening after
work and not even blink an eye, but somehow we didn’t have time to go work out.

In the last few weeks, we’ve attempted to stop making those
excuses. We faithfully go to the gym three or four times a week and make a
conscious effort to not talk ourselves out of it. But even as I write this, I
can feel my need to start making excuses again bubble up. Especially in light
of some of the recent and upcoming changes in my life.

I’ve had a writing breakthrough. After a long and
complicated dry spell (fueled by more excuse making), a turnaround is upon us.
I’ve committed to spending more time focusing on writing and making a bigger
effort to finish my novel.

In January, if all goes well, I will begin Graduate School
to complete my Library and Information Science degree.

Both of these goals mean that I will have to be more disciplined
and determined than ever. I’ll have to quit making excuses and start making
things happen. But with each new challenge, time becomes more and more precious
and fleeting. The time that I devote to going to the gym will be time away from
writing and away from studying. Because of this, I could continue to make
excuses. I could give up something in the name of time. I could go back to
being less than all I can be. That would be the easy thing. And Lord knows, we
all need a little more easy in life…

But instead, I’m going to continue to fight against easy and
excuses. I’m going to ask more of myself and expect more of myself. Time is
precious and fleeting, that’s true enough, but that’s the exact reason we
should not waste a second of it.

But hey, when you hear me still making excuses to not do the
laundry, don’t judge. It’s a long way down that staircase…